“Yes, sir,” the Chief Secretary replied; “if I may be permitted to say so, it is the most conscientious piece of legislation of recent years.”
The Lieutenant-Governor looked anxiously at Ancram from under his bushy eyebrows, and then back again at the Notification. It lay in broad margined paragraphs of beautiful round baboo’s handwriting, covering a dozen pages of foolscap, before him on the table. It waited only for his ultimate decision to go to the Government Printing Office and appear in the Gazette and be law to Bengal. Already he had approved each separate paragraph. His Chief Secretary had never turned out a better piece of work.
“To say precisely what is in my mind, Ancram,” Church returned, beginning to pace the empty chamber, “I have sometimes thought that you were not wholly with me in this matter.”
“I will not disguise from you, sir”—Ancram spoke with candid emphasis—“that I think it’s a risky thing to do, a—deuced risky thing.” His Honour was known to dislike strong language. “But as to the principle involved there can be no two opinions.”
His Honour’s gaunt shadow passed and repassed against the oblong patch of westering February sunlight that lightened the opposite wall before he replied.
“I am prepared for an outcry,” he said slowly at last. “I think I can honestly say that I am concerned only with the principle—with the possible harm, and the probable good.”
Ancram felt a rising irritation. He reflected that if His Honour had chosen to take him into confidence earlier, he—Mr. Ancram—might have been saved a considerable amount of moral unpleasantness. By taking him into confidence now the Lieutenant-Governor merely added to it appreciably and, Ancram pointed out to himself, undeservedly. He played with his watch-chain for distraction, and looked speculatively at the Notification, and said that one thing was certain, they could depend upon His Excellency if it came to any nonsense with the Secretary of State. “Scansleigh is loyal to his very marrow. He’ll stand by us, whatever happens.” No one admired the distinguishing characteristic of the Viceroy of India more than the Chief Secretary of the Government of Bengal.
“Scansleigh sees it as I do,” Church returned; “and I see it plainly. At least I have not spared myself—nor any one else,” he added, with a smile of admission which was at the moment pathetic, “in working the thing up. My action has no bearing that I have not carefully examined. Nothing can result from it that I do not expect—at least approximately—to happen.”
Ancram almost imperceptibly raised his eyebrows. The gesture, with its suggestion of dramatic superiority, was irresistible to him; he would have made it if Church had been looking at him; but the eyes of the Lieutenant-Governor were fixed upon the sauntering multitude in the street below. He turned from the window, and went on with a kind of passion.
“I tell you, Ancram, I feel my responsibility in this thing, and I will not carry it any longer in the shape of a curse to my country. I don’t speak of the irretrievable mischief that is being done by the wholesale creation of a clerkly class for whom there is no work, or of the danger of putting that sharpest tool of modern progress—higher education—into hands that can only use it to destroy. When we have helped these people to shatter all their old notions of reverence and submission and self-abnegation and piety, and given them, for such ideals as their fathers had, the scepticism and materialism of the West, I don’t know that we shall have accomplished much to our credit. But let that pass. The ultimate consideration is this: You know and I know where the money comes from—the three lakhs and seventy-five thousand rupees—that goes every year to make B.A.s of Calcutta University. It’s a commonplace to say that it is sweated in annas and pice out of the cultivators of the villages—poor devils who live and breed and rot in pest-stricken holes we can’t afford to drain for them, who wear one rag the year through and die of famine when the rice harvest fails! The ryot pays, that the money-lender who screws him and the landowner who bullies him may give their sons a cheap European education.”